About The Lodge

The family started the plans for building Konkapot Lodge on the back of a napkin. What started as a 8 bedroom family home, ended as a 28-room hotel near Shawano, WI. Our architect, Gary Sobeck, who also designed the White Tail Inn in St. Germaine, Wisconsin, took these rough ideas and created the existing building.

The handcrafted log work was done by Arrowhead Log Homes, owned and operated by tribal member, Jeff Miller. Jeff had recently opened his log building business nearby. Arrowhead is the first log builder to be classified as a “sustainable harvest” builder and Konkapot Lodge is the first such categorized log structure. Considering the ever increasing demand for building materials pitted at odds with environmental concerns, Konkapot Lodge was built with every effort to maximize efficiency and minimize waste.

The greatest challenge to building the Lodge, was the enormous logs needed to support the building. They were generally too large for skidders to pull out of the woods here or on the Menominee Reservation. We were going to have to have them shipped from Montana.

Several weeks before ordering the logs in August, 1997, we had a large storm pass through Shawano County. Several large tracts of older growth forest on the Stockbridge-Munsee Reservation were blown down in the storm. These logs were all salvaged from the blow down and were used to build Konkapot Lodge. Many of these logs were well over 100 years old. The logs were individually scribed on site and the log work took over six months to complete.

Once the log work was finished, Gil-Hur Builders of Sun Prairie began the stick built portion of the building and completed the project in August of 1998.

We are sincerely grateful to Mr. Sobeck, Paul Nooyen, the project coordinator for Gil-Hur Builders, and Jeff Miller of Arrowhead Log Homes for working with us to create our dream lodge. No one seemed the least bit intimidated by our insistence on a full log great room with a traditional built hotel and we are delighted with the results.

We are encouraged and grateful to all our guests who not only recognize the effort to build sustainably and use green practices, but who wholeheartedly enjoy and appreciate it as well.